Jacksonville shooter had history of mental illness
David Katz, who killed two people and himself at a “Madden NFL 19” tourney, had been hospitalized twice in psychiatric facilities.
BALTIMORE — The suspect in a deadly shooting at a Florida video game tournament had previously been hospitalized for mental illness, according to court records in his home state of Maryland reviewed by The Associated Press.
Divorce filings from the parents of 24-year-old David Katz of Baltimore say that as an adolescent he was twice hospitalized in psychiatric facilities and that he was prescribed antipsychotic and antidepressant medications.
The records show Katz’s parents disagreed on how to care for their troubled son, with his father claiming his estranged wife was exaggerating symptoms of mental illness as part of their long and bitter custody battle. The couple divorced in 2007.
Katz opened fire Sunday at a gaming bar inside a collection of restaurants and shops along the St. Johns River in Jacksonville. He killed two people and wounded nine others before fatally shooting himself during the “Madden NFL 19” tournament, authorities said.
Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams has declined to comment on what motivated Katz to open fire inside a gaming bar connected to a pizzeria at The Jacksonville Landing, a collection of restaurants and shops along the St. Johns River. Williams said he used at least one handgun in the attack.
Such tournaments can involve high stakes. The Jacksonville tournament had $5,000 in prize money to divide among the top finalists.
But gamer Shay Kivlen, 21, of Seattle and other competitors insisted most players take losses in stride and, even with cash on the line, still view it as being just a game.
“No one deserves to die over playing a video game, you know?” said Derek Jones, 30, who traveled from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to compete in Jacksonville. “We’re just out here trying to win some money for our families and stuff.”
The suspect’s father, Richard Katz of Baltimore, and his mother, Elizabeth Katz of Columbia, Maryland, did not respond to phone messages Sunday or Monday. Efforts by the AP to reach them at their homes were also unsuccessful.
Divorce filings say David Katz played video games obsessively as a young adolescent, often refusing to go to school or to bathe. Elizabeth Katz, a toxicologist who worked at the Department of Agriculture, said she would confiscate some of her son’s gaming equipment after finding him playing games in the wee hours.
“His hair would very often go unwashed for days. When I took his gaming equipment controllers away so he couldn’t play at 3 or 4 in the morning, I’d get up and find that he was just walking around the house in circles,” the mother said, according to a transcript included in the court files.
At one point, she put his put his gaming controllers in her bedroom behind a locked door, and he punched a hole in the door, she said.
Elizabeth Katz said her youngest son had increasing difficulty concentrating following his parents’ split. A judge awarded custody of the boy to his mother, with visitation rights to the father.
At times David “curled up into a ball,” refused to attend school and sobbed, she said. She asserted that her ex-husband instructed David not to take Risperidal — an antipsychotic medication prescribed to him. The father claimed in court filings that David was not “diagnosed as psychotic.”
He missed large stretches of school while under his mother’s supervision. He was admitted to the Sheppard Pratt mental health system in Ellicott City for about 12 days in late 2007. Court documents say a psychiatrist at that time administered antidepressants. He later spent about 13 days at Potomac Ridge, a mental health services facility in Rockville.
Katz, a NASA engineer, asserted that his ex-wife had “an obsession with using mental health professionals and in particular psychiatric drugs to perform the work that parents should naturally do.” He said she routinely gave false information to mental health care providers. He described one incident in which his son was handcuffed by police after locking himself in his mother’s car in an attempt to avoid going to a mental health appointment with her.
By the time the boy was 15, the father asserted that Elizabeth Katz “routinely” called the police for “trivial matters.” In a transcript of a 2010 phone call, the mother phoned a 911 dispatcher, accusing David of “abusing” her by coming home late after a visitation with his father. She then insisted he was “assaulting” her by trying to gain control of the cable cord to the television. She complained to the dispatcher that he was rolling his eyes and laughing.
“You’ll roll your eyes. Fine. You’ll pay. Where are you going to be tomorrow?” she said in the transcript, addressing her son. The dispatcher encouraged her not to say anything further until a police officer arrived. He was eventually sent to a wilderness program in Utah called Redcliff Ascent for nearly 100 days.
According to the father’s version of events, the relationship between mother and son got increasingly worse.
Elizabeth Katz put David’s clothes in suitcases on at least two occasions and asked him to leave, including once on Mother’s Day in 2007. In court filings, the father asserted the mother and son “do not have a good relationship and David routinely expresses his anger” toward her. He claimed that when David was staying with him, the boy showed no signs of behavioral problems and was “generally lively, communicative” and “playful.”
In a 2010 letter, David Katz wrote a letter to a magistrate judge saying he wanted to live with his father and describing his mother as “pretty crazy.” He said she called the police to the family’s home about 20 times and “gets drunk.” He blamed her for his poor grades.
The younger Katz was known to barely speak to fellow gamers and sometimes exhibited an erratic playing style, according to other competitors.
“We’ve always known he was a little off and stuff just because he wasn’t social at all,” Kivlen said Monday.
Kivlen, who said he had once beaten Katz for a coveted spot in a tournament, heard secondhand from a friend that Katz had been asking where Kivlen had gone shortly before the shooting.
After losing his single-elimination game Sunday, Kivlen said, he left to take a nap at his hotel about 20 minutes before the attack. He was watching a live stream of the tournament online when the gunfire erupted.
A friend hiding in a bathroom at the venue answered his phone. When he said Kivlen may have been a target, Kivlen called police and an officer was sent to his hotel room for about 90 minutes until they received word that the gunman was dead.